


Good Night, Good Knight

by harperhug



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, F/F, Harm to Children, M/M, Medical Inaccuracies, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 02:58:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 13,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3634110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harperhug/pseuds/harperhug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>V-Day had swept through the world like a bull in a china shop, if the bulls were people and the china was also people. (Updates every Sunday.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Harry and Nikki

**Author's Note:**

> There will be at least two very graphic descriptions of violence, one of which will involve extremely gory violence inflicted on a child and a man with a mental disorder.
> 
> There will also be at least one very graphic description of a medical procedure done without anesthesia, as well as an instance of fairly graphic violence from a medical student to a patient.

_“Galahad, what the hell is going on?”_

_He couldn’t answer, because he had to keep stabbing punching kicking shooting burning stabbing punching kicking shooting burning and not stop **stop** never stop  
_

The nurse who woke him walking in had brown eyes that appeared larger thanks to the dark bags underneath them. She moved with the regular rhythm of habit, flipping through the medical charts clipped to patient beds, one at a time, and fiddling with the machines they were hooked up to with an exhaustion that screamed sleep deprivation and something that tugged deeply at his gut, deeper than the breathtaking railroad spike of heat somewhere near his pancreas. Thinking about it made him aware of another spike on near his left eye, smaller but no less painful, and of an aching throb around his neck. He wanted to feel around and check them for…something, but the moment he did, yet another spike slammed down against his right shoulder. His breathing hitched, and he instinctively tried to suppress his reaction to some disturbance he could not name.

The nurse didn’t appear to notice his distress, or even that he was awake and aware, despite periodically flicking her eyes in his direction as if her eyes were trying to leave her face. They only focused once she pulled out a sandwich to unwrap and bite while checking the patient next to him. This close, he could see that her black hair was curled outward at the end, as if it, too, was trying to escape the misery that showed in every drooping curve and caffeinated line in her body.

“Damn, I told them not to put eggs,” she muttered, wrapping the sandwich back up and moving to toss it into the trash. This meant her hand moved close to Galahad’s face, and he suddenly found his own hands and reached out to stop her. He noticed one of them was partially wrapped in fresh bandages, and both had angry red gouges all over them.

Her sudden shriek echoed against several unaware ears and four conscious ones as he flinched and she covered her mouth.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize—were you awake the whole time? I think I’d notice…oh, but I’m pretty tired,” she flopped on the side of his bed, all grace gone. “How are you feeling?” she asked, one hand crushing the sandwich, the other fluttering above his body like a butterfly that didn’t know where to land.

He wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to look so desperately sad, but what came out of his mouth was, “Eggsy.”

“Eggs? You like eggs? You want this?” she offered him the sandwich.

“It’s better than Merlin’s going to let me have for some time, so if you don’t mind,” was his inexplicable reasoning for reaching for the sandwich in her hand.

She pulled it away. “Here, I’ll feed it to you. You can’t use your hands yet,” she said, putting the sandwich on the sideboard and staring at an empty wipe dispenser forlornly before giving up and trying to spread a single drop of disinfectant from a small plastic bottle. “Here, let me get your breathing tube out so you can eat that. I probably should’ve taken it out a while ago to clean it, actually, but I’ve been really busy and the hospital’s been short on staff lately. Well, all hospitals are, actually, and I’ve kinda been avoiding you anyway, since-”

She cut herself off and froze in place, stilling hands that had been shakily pulling off tape and pressing buttons and twisting dials. Galahad didn’t press, and in a second she began working again.

“I guess you don’t remember,” she said. “Exhale,” she ordered. He obeyed as she began tugging on the tube. Her hands were close, and he had to suppress the urge to swallow nervously. He was sure his breath smelled terrible, but her concentrated expression didn’t so much as flicker. This close, he saw that, while there were bags under her eyes, the left was bruised from a punch—did his hand throb just then?—and the right was next to an injury that reminded him of a shoe pulled back at the last second.

**_Oh thank god oh thank god oh thank god oh thank god_ **

“Cough.” When he did, she pulled it out fully. “So you nicknamed someone Merlin? You a big fan of old stories?” she asked, settling herself on the side of his bed and breaking off pieces of the sandwich to feed him.

He could barely pay attention to anything but the McDonald’s wrapper, but he remembered to swallow before answering, “I don’t remember. I must, because I’m certain my name is Galahad.”

“Well, you’re in luck, Galahad. I was studying head trauma before I came,” she waved a hand around the disorganized room, “here, and I know that the things you remember are often important clues to your life, even if they’re a bit jumbled up. How about after this, I go look for the stuff you came here with, and see if we can’t figure out what your name is, alright?”

Galahad nodded obediently.

“Do you need anything” she yawned, leaning her head in hands propped up by elbows on one side of his legs “else?”

He wanted a deep Scottish voice in his ear. He wanted an unusually heavy weight in his hand. He wanted a cheap, horrendous cologne to fill his nose.

He wanted to claw his face off.

* * *

The entire area between her shoulders and her neck was stiff when she woke half-sprawled across a hospital bed for what felt like the millionth day in a row. She wasn’t unique in that respect; since V-Day, every medical professional, former medical professional, and even aspiring medical professionals like herself had been working beyond overtime trying to take care of the wounded. And as exhausted as they were, none of them would trade with the sole man in the entire hospital who was allowed to take normal hours. Janus Greene—Jolly Greene Giant, they would probably never call him again—was in charge of identifying the putrefying dead, day in and day out. There was no more room in any of the refrigerated units, and some of those were no longer functioning. Honestly, she was surprised any of them were. The devastation to the electrical grid of this gun-toting, trigger-happy country had been enormous, but she had to give credit where credit was due—the first places they thought to reconnect power to were the hospitals.

There was, however, a unique aspect here in the sense that she had fallen asleep over a patient in what was known as the increasingly-crowded coma ward. And this patient had been the first to wake, which made sense as he was the first patient to have come here. And the last, actually, to have been registered the normal way, with his possessions marked and tucked away somewhere.

As she walked out, she verbally reminded herself that she should get somebody to check on him. Somebody else. He was capable of speech, and she wasn’t a speech therapist. Were there even speech therapists anymore? Was that even a priority? What about physical therapists? She’d seen the man when he was first brought in, and he was more physically fit than the police officers who brought him in, assuming he had massacred everyone, unprompted, in the church. It really wasn’t a stretch, and it still wasn’t now that V-Day had swept through the world like a bull in a china shop, if the bulls were people and the china was also people. No, think about things that aren’t V-Day, Nikki. Don’t ever, ever, ever think about V-Day. Don’t think about the patient. Don’t think about the little girl. Don’t. Just don’t. Not blood like rusted metal and salt and soooo nice against her hands when she-

She stared at the hole she had kicked through the balcony plinth. Right, there were no more maintenance crews taking care of the integrity of the stone. She sat on the floor and pulled at her hair until she thought there might be two bald spots and wondered if the entire balcony would just collapse. Maybe even the whole building. Would anyone care? Just a couple hundred more people who’d probably never wake up anyway, dying, compared to the thousands upon thousands who already had.

Someone made a noise behind her, and she turned to see the man stirring again, in another one of the nightmares he had almost every time she was there. They always went the same way: he would look horrified and clutch his arms, clawing at them first before attempting—and yesterday, succeeding when she had been too tired to reach him fast enough—to break his own fingers.

This time, though, he jerked awake as soon as her fingers touched his shoulders. His hands slapped against her wrists and for a moment she was sure he was going to wrench them broken, as weakened as he had become. Instead, he froze and slowly relaxed, releasing her.

“Have we done this before?” he frowned.

Nikki wasn’t sure whether he meant her trying to wake him up from his nightmare or their current physical positioning. “Yes,” however, was the honest answer in either case.

He brushed his fingers lightly over the red marks he’d made on her arms as she withdrew them. “I apologize,” he rasped. “I thought you were going to choke me.”

Well, that did it. Nikki turned and walked away so she could get someone else, anyone else, to take charge of the ward.

“I believe my name is Gary Knight,” he said suddenly.

“I’ll be sure to tell your new caretaker,” Nikki said when she thought she could speak again.

“Will you please come back?” there was guilt in his voice even deeper than hers. “I won’t touch you again.” The following seconds were silent and still.

Then, “Coming back would be a terrible idea. And I’ll see you in the morning.”


	2. Eggsy and Roxy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's still not a whole lot going on, but at least there are some welcome faces! And one quite unwelcome one...

Seven days later:

“Roxy!” Eggsy greeted. “What’re you doing here? Thought the meeting’s not for another hour.”

“And if there were a meeting, you’d be late,” Roxy said, walking inside when he gestured. “I couldn’t reach you to tell you that Merlin canceled it, so I came here. Did your Mum chuck her mobile?” Such things weren’t unheard of, after V-Day almost every single person discarded their phones in street bonfires lit in remembrance of the people who’d been lost—killed by the people lighting them. Eggsy just shoved his hands in his pockets when he went by them. He didn’t need to remember the man he was trying to recreate in the mirror every day.

“Thanks,” Eggsy said, closing the door behind her. “I’ll heat up some tea, I guess.”

“Thank you, Eggsy. It would be so nice to get some hot food finally,” Roxy flopped gracefully, somehow, onto the creaking gray futon. “The heat’s still out on my entire block.”

“Well, you’re welcome to stay here. I’ve got some extra rooms, and everything runs on water power. You might want to think about moving closer to the Thames.”

“I’ll leave the buildings here for the wanderers, thanks. They need a place to stay, too. Besides, leaving my family alone is not an option right now,” Roxy said, eyes distant. Eggsy didn’t push; her older brother had joined the legions of those who had killed a loved one during V-Day and willingly exiled themselves to avoid the memory more than any sort of legal action. Law enforcement had gone haywire in the aftermath, because there were so many dead, some by their own hand, and the only person who could be held responsible died at Eggsy’s hand. Not that he regretted killing Valentine, except perhaps more slowly. In Mr. Morton’s case, it had been his infant daughter, head smashed and smeared against the walls before he had beaten his wife into a coma.

Usually, if such violence could be described with anything resembling “usual,” he would call one of the best doctors in the world to treat her, but a third of the world had fallen into comas and there was no priority given to those whose families could pay more. Finally, it became apparent that the great violence had also been a great equalizer. When Eggsy went back to see his surviving friends, they didn’t bat an eye at his suit. Of course, that was because they assumed he’d salvaged it from some abandoned shop, but the fact that people of all backgrounds were able to interact so casually in their grief was still heartwarming, in a way.

A lock of greasy hair fell onto his unwashed face. He probably hadn’t showered in a month; access to clean water had become much more difficult now that so many of the pipes carrying it had been uprooted, and what little flowed now was often contaminated by bloated corpses. The first days had been the worst, when every pool, lake, and river had appeared to be choked by the lightweight bodies of children. The aftermath wasn’t much better, when the heavier bodies of adults who had been mutilated and left sitting in water had been fished out. It was getting to the point where hospitals and churches would burn bodies in huge fires on the streets as soon as they were identified. Eggsy didn’t blame them; when there were so many living wounded requiring the limited number of hours in the day to care, the time shouldn’t be wasted on sentimentality. Still, there was a part of him that dreamed of going to Kentucky and sifting through the ashes of a blond woman and her hateful pastor to find…well, he wanted to find Harry impeccably dressed and fully intact. This was, after all, his dream.

Roxy wasn’t thinking about that. The smell of earl grey saturated with artificial sweeteners would’ve turned her stomach a mere four weeks ago. Now, the fact that it was steaming meant it was more precious than a Faberge egg. It was funny, how all these things she’d assumed she couldn’t live without had simply stopped mattering once she no longer had them. Really, the only loss that still smarted was that of her brother, and who knows what’s happened to him since? No one carried electronic devices anymore, not really. Modern technology may have caught up to Kingsman, but, she thought as she looked down at her standard issue iPad in her purse, it had regressed to where Kingsman was once again miles ahead of the curve.

“I wish he’d send us out on a mission,” Eggsy sighed into his tea.

“There’s nothing we could possibly do undercover,” Roxy said. “Most people don’t trust technology, and it’s getting harder to find parts for repairs. Honestly, I’m surprised these glasses can still transmit.”

“They’re solar powered. You just put them in the windowsill when you ain’t using them and they’ll be right as rain in a minute,” Eggsy answered. “And there’s so much going on, though. Every country not in Asia has a massive power vacuum, and South America and the majority of Africa have no government left at all.”

“Uncle’s glad for that,” Roxy said, referring to Perceval. “He’s been assigned to watch over the entire area, but there’s not much for him to do. Every Asian government collectively refused the chips unless Valentine agreed to put up restrictions to certain websites, except Japan and South Korea. But the self-driven rebuilding efforts there are incredible. Uncle says that they might even achieve full functionality again within the year.” She looked out the window. In a country where people were raised with the virtue of individualism over community, she couldn’t see that happening without incredible luck.

“You never know, Rox. Maybe we’ll get a miracle,” Eggsy said, sitting down next to her. They sipped their tea and watched the birds fly by the window in comfortable silence.

* * *

A “whooshing” sound came from Roxy’s purse, and she used a hand to cover the speakers as much to pull it out.

“The TARDIS? Really?” Eggsy laughed.

“It’s a very enjoyable programme. I hope the BBC brings it back on someday,” Roxy said, propping it up with the teapot and her own cup. “I know it sounds childish, but it was entertaining, and we need those hopeful stories now more than ever. Merlin, I’m here with Galahad,” she greeted the bald man on the screen. “What do you need us to do?”

“Nothing. I already had Kay and Lucan stationed in America. They’ll be the ones taking care of this. Now, I want you to know that I’m breaking every protocol letting you watch this, and it’s only because you were part of the mission that should’ve killed her.”

Merlin’s face and audio disappeared from the screen, replaced by footage—even the apocalypse couldn’t stop people from shooting vertical videos, it seemed—of a crowded hospital, not that that was a particularly good descriptor. There were two women in civilian dress carrying in a woman dressed in black, and a man and woman clad in once-white coats. One doctor had a cigarette in his mouth, and the other had dark hair that looked like each individual strand was doing its level best to escape into orbit. Roxy wanted to smooth it down with her hands.

“Put her down! Jesus, I think she was poisoned,” the dark-haired doctor said in an American accent, examining sickly green lines spidering across a familiar arm.

“Her prosthetics are missing, probably stolen,” said one of the civilians. The smoking doctor shooed them away and revealed Gazelle’s face.

“Ma’am, can you hear me?” the dark-haired doctor asked kindly. “You are in the Albert B. Chandler Hospital in Lexington. My name is Dr. Zhi.”

Gazelle’s response was too soft to catch, but it must have included something about her name, because the smoking doctor dropped his cigarette and pulled out a scalpel.

“STOP!” the dark-haired doctor rose and pushed him away.

“What the fuck? She’s Valentine’s assistant. She’s the reason for all of this.”

“And she’s ill and injured.”

“She was well enough to get all the way here from…wherever the fuck she was.”

“Hasn’t enough blood been spilled?” the dark-haired doctor reached inside her pocket for something. Roxy wondered who she had killed. Nobody protested that much unless they’d lost someone at their own hand.

The scalpel-wielding doctor turned around and threw his hands up into the air. “Fine! You know what? Fine. You wanna take care of her, you take care of her.”

“Thank you, Janus,” the dark-haired doctor picked Gazelle up.

“Just don’t let me see her face,” he added.

The video ended, and Merlin’s face filled their screens again.

“Gazelle’s still alive? After getting a dose of…whatever that thing in my shoes is?” Eggsy broke the silence first.

“Those were Harry’s shoes, Galahad. They were old, and toxins become less effective with time. It’s completely possible that she was just sickened,” Merlin answered.

“What did she want in that hospital?” Roxy asked.

“We’re not sure yet, and while it is in Kentucky, we don’t know if it’s got anything to do with Harry in the church.”

“How could it not be?” Eggsy demanded. “The woman doctor, she said ‘Lexington,’ yeah? Can you get me there?”

“Stand down, Galahad. This isn’t your mission, and you’re too close to it.” With that, Merlin’s face disappeared and the screen went black.

Roxy put her hand on Eggsy’s chest to stop him from pushing the table over, iPad, tea, and all. He struggled against her for a moment, until she put her arms around him. They stood like that for a few silent seconds before,

“You know how to fly?”

“I was just waiting for you to ask,” Roxy smiled.


	3. Harry and Janus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Galahad starts recovering his memories, which worries Nikki, and worries Janus Greene more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that in the second half of the chapter, there is a (non-graphic) mention of the murder of a child, and the attempted murder of a comatose patient by his doctor.

“Good morning, Galahad,” the nurse did her best to smile at him. It was terribly flimsy, and when Galahad made no attempt to return it, it dropped with some relief. “I think we should get you started with physical therapy, now that you can move. Lift one leg for me, just an inch off the bed for now, and we’ll see if we can’t get it further.”

Galahad surprised her by lifting his right, then his left foot, at least ten inches off the bed.

“Damn, bro,” Nikki’s face lit up like…no, it didn’t light up like a boy’s, but Galahad couldn’t think properly. “That’s awesome!”

“I could do better,” the utterance is soft, but sure. Galahad knows that, even if the nurse was impressed that he was so much further along than most coma patients, he should be able to do so much more.

“Well, don’t worry about that. Rotate your ankles, one at a time. You’re awake. That’s already a big improvement. Don’t compare yourself to how you used to be. Compare yourself to how you want to be. Although, speaking of how you used to be—okay, now bend your knees, one at a time—you have some recollection of your athleticism. Was that from a memory?”

Galahad didn’t want to answer. She would undoubtedly ask about the memory, and considering that her job was to save lives, he doubted she would appreciate knowing that he had ever infiltrated a Middle Eastern compound by beating up multiple men so he could torture another. And then he’d even stuffed a grenade in a young man’s pocket, blowing him up. He swallowed down something sharp and hot.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me. I can guess. I mean, I was at the church when you got picked up,” Nikki said, watching him carefully. “I’m guessing you saw a lot of shit go down.”

“Did you find the weapons I came here with?”Galahad answered. He really couldn’t remember stepping inside a church after being forced in primary school by his mother…which was a memory worth preserving, even if it didn’t help tell him how he ended up here.

Nikki wrinkled her nose. “Rotate your shoulders, and no, actually. I opened up the door to the back storeroom, and there’s a guy there with no head and a giant gun. The room’s covered in some foul-smelling substance that I tested a sample of because he looked like a military guy and who knows what kind of biological weapons they have access to.” She sighed and closed her eyes, trying to get her emotions under control before she opened her eyes again and smiled too brightly. “He’d been there for days. I can’t believe nobody smelled him! Anyway, bend your elbows.” If her voice grew increasingly high-pitched, Galahad decided discretion was the better part of valor.

“Okay, you’re way more physically capable than most people who’ve come out of week-long comas,” Nikki slipped both arms under his torso. “Come on, let’s get you up.”

“Thank you for your help, ma’am,” Galahad sat up.

Nikki grimaced as she withdrew. “It’s okay. It’s my job, and it’s literally the least I can do.” She wouldn’t look at him anymore.

“You could have run away. I know I scared you yesterday. Are your arms still bruised?”

Now he had her undivided, incredulous attention, even if she were only looking at the floor, the walls, and everywhere else that wasn’t Galahad. “I think I know why you call yourself Galahad,” her tone was pleading with him to drop the subject. “There was a little girl here shortly after we brought you in, and she was reading a book about Arthurian legends.” Her smile was a little sad, a little bitter, a little twisted. “She said she hoped she could make them come alive.”

“May I see it?” Galahad inquired.

Nikki paled and shook her head. “It’s, uh, it’s not really legible anymore, sorry about that.”

“Why would you apologize me when you’re afraid of me?” Galahad leaned forward.

Nikki gaped at him. “I’m not afraid of—look,” she took a deep breath and rubbed her temples. “Look, we picked you up outside a church where a slaughter had taken place. My friend thinks you’ve killed a lot of people, and to be honest, I think so, too. And yeah, I was afraid of you at first. But that very night, you saved my life. I know you don’t remember this,” she held up a hand to silence him when he opened his mouth, “but you need to know that I’m not afraid of what you’re going to do to me.”

“Then why the hell are you looking at me like I’m going to shoot you?” Galahad didn’t realize he’d shouted until Nikki walked out. Then he dug his fingers into his arms as tightly as he could without breaking the skin.

* * *

 

“You don’t owe him anything,” Janus reminded her as he helped her secure a Kevlar vest to herself in the changing room. Like the gun attached to her waist, it was too big for her, but most things that the hospital’s deceased security guards had carried or worn were.

“Even if that was true, I’m still a doctor. Now, I’m a doctor who owes him my life. Fuck!” Nikki swore when she slammed her knee against the hard wooden bench.

Janus couldn’t help but smile, even as his eyes tightened in frustration. “You weren’t in control, Nikki. None of us were.”

“He was,” Nikki said softly, sitting down. “I was strangling him, and the signal was fucking _screaming_ in my head, and when he woke up he grabbed my arms and started to press, like he was going to break them, you know?”she looked up so that her eyes were on him, but her gaze was far away. “But he didn’t. He just kind of…held my arms away from him.”

Janus pressed his lips together. “Held” wasn’t the word he would’ve used. Not when Nikki’s arms were still mottled yellow and green.

“He fought against the signal, successfully, and that’s the only reason I’m alive right now. The least I could do for him is get him a library book,” Nikki came back into herself.

Janus sighed and crossed his arms. “I’m not sure I like you going to _her_ , though.” He felt bad for Mrs. McCoy, he really did. Over two sixty-second periods, nearly everyone in the world had become killers, mostly of children. But few people reacted the way that McCoy had, by barricading herself into the library with the corpses of her small victims.

Nikki patted her pocket for some reason. “I think I’ll be okay. I mean, we have the fact that we both killed children in common,” she said with more bitterness than Janus had ever heard in her voice.

Janus brushed his finger lightly across tiny scars on Nikki’s face, the remnants of gouges and scratches left by small fingernails, and pretended not to notice her lean her head toward his fingers. “Not your fault, Nikki. If you’re going out to face all those scavengers and stragglers as some sort of penance for that girl’s life when will it end?”

“Never,” Nikki swatted his hand away and walked past him brusquely. “You can’t make up for two lives with one. I can only do my best. Remember to feed Galahad in three hours. Whatever you can find will be fine.”

Janus waved her goodbye and waited until she slammed the door shut behind her to dig out a can of peas from the single functional refrigerated unit in the entire morgue. He walked upstairs until he reached the newly-named Coma Ward and found the man Nikki called Galahad wobbling with a white-knuckled grip on his bedframe.

“Did Nikki say you could walk?” Janus asked in his doctor voice. Galahad’s head snapped up.

“Who are you?” the patient demanded as he straightened and tried to look as dignified and regal as a person could while their knees were knocking together.

“Dr. Janus Greene, psychiatrist-turned-coroner. I take it you’re the coma patient-turned-regular patient,” Janus raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. Is she alright? I didn’t mean to yell at her this morning.”

Janus would usually have waved it off. Patients needing long-term care usually weren’t the most cooperative. But this was no ordinary patient.

“Listen, I don’t know what your endgame is, but my very, very dear friend just left the safety of the hospital to get you a children’s book,” Janus pulled himself up to his full height and stood in front of Galahad. “Last night, she exposed herself to a potential biohazard to see if she could find the things you came here with and help you get your memory back. But she’s not going to want to know.”

“Oh?” the patient didn’t back down. If anything, his gaze was more intense than before.

Janus threw a bloodstained suit wrapped in plastic onto the patient’s bed. “I was a police officer before I started working here, so I know what bulletproof material feels like.” He took no small satisfaction at patient’s widening his eyes. “So just for fun, I played with everything else you had, like the ring that fried my toaster” he took the signet ring out of his coat pocket in its own plastic bag and decided against admitting that he had actually given himself 50,000 volts straight to the nipples, “which meant that until I took these,” he held out the glasses that he had thankfully _not_ tasered himself with in a slightly larger plastic bag, “out of my house, my cell phone wouldn’t work. Too much interference. So that begs the question, Mr. Galahad: who the fuck are you, that you need a bulletproof suit, a taser ring, and recording glasses?”

The patient grunted, and one hand tightened on the bed while the other went up to touch his bandages. His breathing grew shallow and rapid, and Janus tried his best not to smile. There was something wrong with the man, and he was damned if Nikki, blinded by her guilt, was going to get caught up with all of that.

“Are you a spy? An assassin?” Janus prodded. “I’m right, aren’t I, when I say that you killed all those people in the church?”

At the word _church,_ the patient gave his full, undivided attention to Janus, staring until hairs prickled at the back of the doctor’s neck. Still, Janus Greene didn’t retreat.

“I get that you’ve been greatly weakened by your injuries. You can’t do Dr. Zhi any harm right now. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people looking for you, either to kill you or to make sure you’re okay, and she could get caught up with that, you understand?”

Apparently, he didn’t, because all the patient said was, “The Rainmaker is missing.”


	4. Eggsy and Janus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eggsy and Roxy discuss Gazelle's travels, and Harry finally remembers the church.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter ends with a character having a panic attack and being drugged against his consent. Please don't read if these are triggers for you.

“If you’d just been poisoned, you go to a hospital first, right?” Eggsy asked Roxy in between scanning the horizon for possible looming threats. Really, to anyone who could see them on the ground, they were probably the most interesting sight in quite some time. The majority of the world’s airports were still recovering from the sudden, massive loss of most of their planes.

“Of course, if I thought the hospital was safe.”

“Yeah, so why…that place?” Eggsy frowned at the ground.

“I think,” Roxy began, discreetly skipping over the fact that Eggsy had lost the ability to say the word _Kentucky_ , “she’s looking for something specific and important to her. If you’ve just been poisoned and you need immediate medical help, you go to the closest hospital, not one hundreds of miles away.”

“How did she cross an entire ocean, though? It’s not like the cruising business has got a lot going for it these days. Most people who took cruises on the regular got their heads blown up.”

Roxy fell silent. Eggsy winced. While he had been enjoying the sight and feeling of Princess Tilde’s arse, she had had to do her best to comfort Merlin as he fell apart under the weight of all the people he’d killed with the literal push of a button.

“Shit, Rox. I didn’t mean to remind you.”

“It’ll have to wait till later. Do we have a plan of attack? Scavengers are more prolific near hospitals,” Roxy spoke and sat as if she’d starched her entire being.

Eggsy thought for a moment. Since the human race had finally gotten their shit together enough to prioritize the actual wellbeing of each other, hospitals had become the centers of what remained of civilization. Governments were set up nearby—only the politicians who had actually cared about their constituents remained, in far higher numbers than Eggsy had expected, and in that respect, Valentine had actually done the world a favor—the buildings near them were the only ones with guaranteed electricity and water, and Eggsy wouldn’t be surprised if, in a few years, the new big cities were named after the hospitals.

Of course, not everyone had decided to settle in these designated safe zones, and those who did weren’t always there to try to regain some semblance of normality. While most of the Kingsman insisted on being stragglers—those who refused to move into the safe zones—they did so knowing they were more than a match for the scavengers who roamed the area just outside the safe zones, searching for victims to mug.

“Do you still have ammunition?” Eggsy asked. Nearly every single miner, like every other professional who worked with sharp tools, had utterly decimated each other. Overnight, metals of all kinds became a rare commodity.

“You know what I think?” Roxy sounded less stiff now. “She must have had help. I mean, by the time those doctors found her, she was a mess who couldn’t walk. And she went from the Swiss Alps stronghold to Kentucky in, what, two weeks? She must have been sleeping somewhere during that time.”

“So, who do we know who was part of Valentine’s plans _and_ survived V-Day?” Eggsy summarized. He couldn’t think of anyone except for Bors, who lived in a house with an electric barrier that prevented Valentine’s signal from reaching its occupants, and who had managed to remove the chip from his neck without alerting Valentine.

“Maybe someone else cut their chip out,” Roxy suggested.

“Yeah, but it’d have to be someone with as much medical knowledge and paranoia as Bors, and I don’t think many of them exist,” Eggsy said. “It’s worth looking into, though.”

“We’re landing,” Roxy said after a silent moment. “Brace yourself.” And they both knew what she was really referring too.

* * *

“The what?” the doctor asked, but then the sounds of two simultaneous flatlines filled the air and left him staring despairingly at the corpses of a man and a woman.

Harry barely noticed.

_Galahad, can you hear me? Harry, what the hell is going on in there?_

He remembered the part of him that still wanted to claw his face off screaming at him to leave as he stared at a blonde’s fearful face. He remembered not listening. He remembered firing and stabbing and axing and electrocuting and burning and impaling and all the while a N.E.V.E.R.E.N.D.I.N.G. **_badnostop_** in his head that he could feel now. He had gotten stabbed in the melee, and he’d been slammed into an organ and had various pieces of wood broken over his back. He touched tender spots in his back and was surprised that he hadn’t felt pain there previously.

“…just wrapped those ribs this morning,” the doctor’s scolding voice just barely broke through the, the, the…and he tried to grab onto it he did. But he couldn’t breathe.

But all he could think about was the sick-sweet smell of red red red red red blood saturating every inch of the walls and floor and knowing he’d been the one who spilled it. He’d enjoyed it, tearing people who had devoted their lives to hating and destroying innocent people who were just trying to live their lives _i n t o p i e c e s_. But they had been innocent, too, and really, compared to a Kingsman like him, they’d never stood a chance.

“What do you mean, you’re a Kingsman?” the doctor’s voice was still present, if far away. Harry thought he might have heard plastic crinkle before Janus said, “It says that on your suits.” But Harry couldn’t think past the white-hot knives shredding any semblance of control he had left. He felt every inch of the groove on his head and every bruise on his body and the deep tear in his shoulder and the jagged cut on his stomach and leaned his head against the cool metal frame at the foot of his bed, trying not to vomit.

“Sir?” the doctor’s hand was undeservingly gentle on his shoulder. “Sir, are you having a flashback?”

Harry refused to answer. Couldn’t, there were too many thoughts and too little words and too much red and too little air.

“Sir, can you sit up?” Warmth and strength from too-large hands belonging to a too-large man on the small of his back and his shoulders. “There we go. Can you look at me?” A voice not accompanied by the smell of horrible and cheap perfume. “Sir, did you have a flashback?”

“What did he do to me?” Harry asked, only half present.

The concern in the doctor’s face turned into confusion.

“I killed all those people.”

And now it was wariness.

“I wanted to.”

Now it was fear. “Who are you?” the doctor whispered like he didn’t really mean for Harry to hear it.

Harry did anyway. “Harry Hart,” he said. “Mass murderer,” he was sure he was missing something else, but whatever it was could wait. He reached forward and put his own hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “I’ll be taking my leave now. Best to deal with those two before they start to smell,” he nodded toward the two corpses on their beds.

“Not happening,” the doctor drew himself to his full height, which was more than enough to rival Harry’s. “You can barely walk right now, and maybe I don’t know who you are or how dangerous you can be, or even what you did to all those people inside that church, but I’m still a doctor, dammit, and I’m not going to let a patient put himself in danger!”

Harry gritted his teeth against the shakiness in his muscles and the dizzy pain in his head, both exacerbated by the infernal beeping that kept him too distracted to gather his strength and wits. In fact, he was so unfocused that he didn’t realize the doctor had restrained him onto his bed until it was too late to do anything but beg.

He’d seen the look on the nurse’s face the day before, a look that went beyond the fear he’d seen in the blond woman at the church before he abandoned his own principles. He knew he’d felt the signal again. He must have hurt her at some point, and that was why she’d been so afraid of him then.

He needed to warn the doctor and Nikki to stay away from him, but a new, searing pain in his neck was pressing him down like an actual, physical weight, and he could only get her name out before he could no longer fight against it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time, Nikki meets the librarian and Eggsy meets a straggler.


	5. Nikki, Janus, and Eggsy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Please keep in mind that this chapter has the moment of extremely graphic violence against a child that caused me to put an adult-content warning on this story. It's only one paragraph, and it'll be marked by ten asterisks (**********) before and after so you can skip it if you wish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you mean it's been three and a half weeks? (In all honesty, I got really sick on Saturday and I had to have my appendix removed, and then I had to do battle with my insurance company so I wasn't left on the hook for thousands of dollars in hospital fees. Ugh, I hate the US healthcare system.) Anyway, here's an extra-long chapter to make up for all you waiting!

“That’s all I’ve got to give away,” Nikki told Ryan apologetically as she handed him half a cheese and ham sandwich. “Stay safe, okay?”

“You too,” Ryan said emphatically. “I mean, the fucking librarian went insane.”

“She’s just hurt,” Nikki felt the need to defend Ophelia Chase. “It’s her job to foster knowledge, and part of that involves nurturing kids. Killing them, it’s a bigger blow to her than it would be to, say, architects.”

“I wanted to be an architect,” Ryan said forlornly. “My father said that girls didn’t have a chance, and when I said I wasn’t a girl, he just laughed.”

“Well, you could start now,” Nikki said, thinking of crumbling infrastructure on the balcony. “A lot of buildings came into contact with, like, planes and cars and buses and stuff.”

“And a lot of architects had sharp pencils and modeling materials to kill each other with,” Ryan said more casually than any teenage boy had a right to speak about death.

“Hey, you said it, not me,” Nikki stood up, not willing to be here for another second.

“Yeah, but only because **you** weren’t saying it,” Ryan chirped.

“Well, some things don’t need to be said. Speaking takes energy, and I’d rather use mine on things that matter more than focusing on the past,” Nikki said simply.

Ryan looked at her far too perceptively. “So, who did you kill?” he asked.

“Goodbye, Ryan,” Nikki said pointedly. She crossed her arms and refused to move an inch from the corner just before the library until she couldn’t see him anymore. Then she turned to badly-scratched wooden doors.

“Ophelia?” Nikki knocked on the door less loudly than the crickets chirping in the browning bushes. “Ophelia, can you hear me?”

There might have been a little shuffle on the other side of the door, but otherwise there was no response. Nikki knocked on the door again. “Ophelia, it’s Nicole Zhi. I just came from the hospital. I need your help with a patient.” The crickets fell silent just long enough for Nikki to hear the flump of aging knees hitting threadbare carpet.

“Ophelia, can you open the door? Just a little? I have something to show you,” holding out the photo in her pocket, Nikki let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding when she heard soft steps coming closer.

“Yes?” Ophelia’s soft voice was muffled, but unmistakable, on the other side of the door.

“Remember when I graduated high school, and you came and gave me a present? The photography book that you got accused of favoritism over?”

“Yes,” Ophelia whispered.

“I still take pictures,” Nikki slid the photo underneath the door and hoped that it wouldn’t make everything even worse. She heard a crinkle, then a cry, and knew it was too late for regrets now. “Ophelia, I need a book. She was reading something just before that picture happened. She was reading to a comatose man and…and…” she couldn’t breathe she couldn’t fucking breathe

_She’s doing bed checks and picking up random garbage on the floor, the only person who should be awake all the way up here. There’s a light on in the ICU, occupied by an elderly woman who had undergone hip replacement surgery that morning and a man who had needed multiple stitches for multiple wounds, the most worrying of which was a gunshot wound to his head. She reminds herself to get the name of the man’s optometrist; those were very good glasses, if they were could deflect bullets with such light materials. Janus suspects the man of murder; really, she has to talk to the man about that. He’s too damn suspicious of everyone. Nikki wants to be charitable, but given his police background, Janus would probably be wary of the cute little dark-skinned girl reading to the John Doe. Funny, she knows that there was a couple downstairs with a daughter, getting treated for some minor lacerations from a car accident, but she thought the family was Caucasian. No matter. Nikki shifts some cellophane lollipop wrappers into her other hand, which is already holding a half-chewed pen cap and loosened scalpel, to pat the girl on the shoulder and ask her what she’s doing._

_The girl stares at her intensely, then, in a rather forlorn voice, asks, “So, I can’t make him into a knight?”_

_“What?” Nikki asks, drawing back._

_The girl lifts the book,_ Le Mort d’Arthur _, and the view of the girl’s hand holding up the book is the last thing she remembers before-_

**********

_Splitting skin on a living human is much more difficult than splitting skin on a practice cadaver, even putting aside the fact that corpses lie docile. The screaming and the hands squeezing her neck and trying to gouge her eyes out, causing her to scream back, can’t completely cover the wonderful squick or the sweetish smell of blood caking her hands and wrists and arms and even her chest, ooh, that **is** nice, like reaching into a warm bath, and she wants to do it again and again and againandagainandagain, wrap herself in this girl’s skin like an exotic fur coat, so she reaches inside and starts pulling and twisting so that she has bracelets that are soft and warm and why has she never done this before, and hey, she can do this some more because there’s a nice soft warm body full of blood and viscera next to her and she could just pick up the scalpel and_

***********

She wasn’t in the hospital anymore, and the warm bracelets wrapped around her wrists were Ophelia’s hands keeping her from clawing her face off.

“Who was she?” Ophelia asked with the raspy voice of someone who hadn’t made a sound that wasn’t screaming for quite some time.

Nikki swallowed, feeling the sweat drying on her face and trying to remember what it felt like to talk like a normal human being. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “I thought she looked familiar. But even after tallying up all our dead,” **_fifty-four fucking names_** “I couldn’t find a relative.” She swallowed again as she looked at the photograph in Ophelia’s hand. “We take pictures of all the dead now, as soon as they pass on,” she held out her own hand for the photo back. “My mentor’s office is covered with them, because we don’t have space to store them anymore. We burn the bodies and put these pictures with the ashes until the family comes to claim the urn.” Then Janus tapes the pictures to his office walls. It’s probably not healthy.

Wordlessly, Ophelia placed both the picture and a clean copy of Arthurian legends into Nikki’s hand. She looked so much more alive than she had when she opened the door that there weren’t really words to describe the vastness of that difference.

“Thanks,” Nikki said, rising to stand as best she could. Ophelia quickly put her hands on Nikki’s arm to steady her. “Thanks,” Nikki said again. “I figured, if anybody could understand me, you would. We’re sort of the only…you know, people that kids should trust who actually killed kids.”

Ophelia’s gaze dropped to the ground. “What do you do after?” she asked quietly.

Too afraid to think about what she was doing in case it stopped working, Nikki blurted out, “Do you want to save lives at the hospital with me?” She immediately tried to take it back. “I mean, you don’t really have to work at the hospital. You can just walk around the city. I have a patient who should start physical therapy soon, but, well, taking walks with supervision is probably the best we can do for now. He’s pretty healthy, anyway. And…look, just say yes so I don’t feel any more like shit than I already do.”

Ophelia actually laughs. It’s a hoarse, hacking thing, and it only lasts a second, followed by, “I don’t think many people would trust me around their sick and vulnerable.”

“They think you’ve got post-traumatic stress disorder or…I don’t know, awakened your latent bloodlust or something,” Nikki shrugged. “Once you show them that you’re fine, they’ll come around. I promise. And we could use the help.” That last part was so true that Nikki grimaced.

“I’ll give a try,” Ophelia said, and if her joints continued to creak as she held her hand out for Nikki to take, it was soon covered up by the nurse’s delighted squeal.

“These last three days have been amazing!” Nikki smiled like the sun. “First, my patient wakes up. Then you start talking again, finally. Everything’s coming up Nikki!”

“Don’t get too happy. When things are going your way, that usually means that something awful is about to happen,” Ophelia cautioned.

“Aw, come on, Lia, you’re no fun,” Nikki slipped into old mannerisms. “Now come on, let’s get out of here. It’s really dusty and I’m too used to breathing in filtered hospital air to not get sick in here.”

They hadn’t even made it half way to the hospital before the sound of the bushes rustling led Nikki to turn around and see a man had jump out of them, some sort of metallic weapon raised and ready to strike. He was wearing a suit that had seen better days, and something about the material felt familiar under Nikki’s hands as she tackled him.

The boy’s weapon clattered to the ground musically when he fell.

“Don’t think I can’t fight you just because you’re bigger than me,” Nikki warned. “I’ve wrestled a 300-pound patient back into his bed, I can wrestle you into submission. Don’t test m-”

The boy raised his weapon, which Nikki recognized as a prosthetic leg fitted with a disturbingly-sharp blade just before she kicked it into the bushes. She heard a cry of pain, and delivered a sharp jab to the boy’s ear before stalking over.

“Why the hell are you hiding?” Nikki demanded. The woman looked up, a gash that reached from her forehead to her temple leaking blood into her dark hair and face and chest and stomach and everywhere else that was so fucking familiar.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t fucking breathe she couldn’t fucking breathe.

She took a deep one when she was able to again, blinking up at the dimmed lights of the ICU. “What happened?” she asked groggily.

* * *

“You were asleep for two days is what happened! I swear to god that panic attacks are getting contagious around here,” Janus fumed. “First that Galahad guy,” he gestured to the bed with the nonresponsive patient, “and now you! You know, there’s only one of me, and I know I’m not handling this right, but I haven’t slept in at least forty hours-”

“Hold on, Galahad had a panic attack?” Nikki sat up gingerly. Figures, of course she would pay attention to that part more than anything regarding her own health.

“Yeah, said your name just before, well,” Janus tried not to sound too guilty. “I sedated him.”

“Well, is he calmer at least?” Nikki asked, sounding too tired to care.

“He’s as calm as I think he’s ever been,” Janus said, opening a box of Q-tips. “I’ve kept you both separated from the other patients until I can figure out what triggered them. Now hold still, you scratched your face up badly enough that the little orphan girl started crying when she saw you. Had to give her Galahad’s glasses to distract her,” he said, unscrewing a small jar of antiseptic. “So,” he said to try and distract her as she tried not to squirm away from the sting, “what had you so afraid?”

“I saw the girl,” Nikki said immediately. “I swear, I saw her in the bushes. Except she was older, like, maybe twenty, thirty years older.”

“Uh-huh,” Janus said skeptically. “And before your unfortunate nap—Ophelia had to carry you, by the way—how long had it been since you’ve slept?”

Nikki sighed and covered her eyes. “Probably as long as you.”

“Then I think I’m right when I say that you were hallucinating your worst nightmare.”

Nikki nodded wearily. Janus figured this was as good of a time as any to take his leave. “Look, you stay here and rest. Talk to Galahad if you want, see if you can coax him into this plane of existence again. I’ll be outside if you need me.” And then he walked until he was sure he was out of earshot to call, “Charlie, get over here!”

The boy who had tried to attack Nikki wore an expression like he’s just tasted sour milk. “Yes, sir?” he greeted grudgingly.

“You said there was a woman with you named, uh, Deere, right?”

“Yeah, but she ran off. I’ve got no clue where she is now,” Charlie said in his British accent.

“Well, you’ll have Ophelia’s help. Go find her. I have her daughter’s body ready for her to claim, if she doesn’t die first.”

“Yes, sir,” Charlie said with a salute. Janus saluted back. Sure, they were from different countries, but a military brat was a military brat, and they followed orders well.

* * *

“So, if your tracking system is right, we’ve got another five miles,” Eggsy was aghast. “You couldn’t have landed us anywhere closer?”

“If I had someone would’ve seen, and then they’d probably attack us for having technology. You know how people treat anything digitized. And this place was already pretty bad before Valentine’s signal struck,” Roxy reminded him. “Besides, you’ll look sicklier if you’re sweating, and our goal is to get to the hospital.”

“Why do I have to play the damsel in distress?” Eggsy complained.

“I could shove a stick up your arse for real, if you think that’d be better,” Roxy pushed against his shoulder.

“I’d like to see you try. You’ve never beaten me at anything except Kingsman training.”

“And look at how poorly that ended up for you,” Roxy teased.

Eggsy pretended he was wiping the sweat from his face. “It ended pretty bad, Rox.”

Roxy pursed her lips, silent for a few long minutes before she pointed to a row of bushes several meters ahead of them. “Whomever clears those in the fewest number of jumps has to do a month’s worth of the other one’s,” she said, taking off at a sprint.

“Oh, you’re on,” Eggsy started running.

“Don’t!”

Roxy skidded to a stop, but managed to stay on her feet, which was more than Eggsy could say; he winced at the sight of grass stains on his trousers. This was going to be his last bespoke suit for a while, now that the materials were so difficult to acquire.

“I heard a woman got poisoned by those bushes,” a skinny girl said not too far from them. “You might want to avoid them.”

“A sick woman? My friend here is,” Roxy stopped as both she and Eggsy realized that their cover story wouldn’t work. “Well, we’re both looking for the hospital. Can you help?”

The girl frowned. “You sound like that asshole scavenger a couple days ago. He attacked a real nice lady. Are you working for him?”

“Shouldn’t you be at home?” Eggsy eyed the setting sun with some trepidation.

The girl looked down guiltily. “There’s not enough food at home. Mom wants me to stop worrying, but I’ve got a little sister at home who’s just a baby.”

Roxy groaned quietly as Eggsy tried his best to keep from tearing up twice in as many hours. “Well, you’re in luck,” he said, offering up all the food he had on him, which was really just a bag of crackers from Tesco. “I’ll see if I can’t get you more soon, alright?”

The girl smiled widely. “That’s fine,” she said. “I mean, the hospital sends out patrols looking for injured people. Sometimes they have food.”

Eggsy nodded. “Well, I’ll see you around, er…”

“Ryan,” the ~~girl~~ boy waved.

“So, whomever was helping Gazelle travel sounded like me,” Roxy said as slowly as she walked. “Maybe it was someone in that bunker? Somebody who thought we killed so many people that we had to be taken down, too?”

“I don’t know anyone in Valentine’s bunker who still has a head not filled with anger at him,” Eggsy said, suddenly running forward and leaping into the air, landing on the other side of the bushes on all fours. “But I do know that I just won.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nikki talks to the dean of the hospital, Ophelia and Ryan find Gazelle, and Eggsy and Roxy have two violent encounters.

“You wanted to see me, ma’am?” Nikki asked, strolling into the office of the hospital’s dean.

“Sit down,” Candice Koning gestured toward the chair in front of her desk. Nikki sat down, doing her best to avoid looking at the corpses on the sides of the walls. “I hear you’ve been hiring.”

“Well, there are people who are having difficulty reaching us. And we’ve got food to spare.” The government van came rolling by every morning. Not that Nikki was usually there, but that was why she had Janus, right?

“Not everyone is suited to hospital life. A woman who killed twenty-three children is **not** going to inspire confidence in our patients.”

Nikki rolled her eyes. “There’s nothing reliable in the world anymore. Ophelia is the best we’ve got.”

Candice held up her hands in mocking surrender. “I’m not saying you can’t hire your own assistant. I let you borrow my niece for a reason. God knows we’re stretched too thin right now. But try to hire someone who looks as put-together as Charlie.”

Charlie, who was unexpectedly good at following orders and had a knack for medicine. Nikki reminded herself to examine that boy’s clothes again. They felt like Galahad’s clothes, and anything could be important to helping the man recover his memories.

“Ophelia is excellent at what she does, like your **nephew** ,” Nikki said impatiently. “And Charlie doesn’t take orders from anyone but Janus. I need my own assistants.”

Candice sighed. “I’m just trying to give the people hope in these troubled times. They need to see us as a united front of professionals they can trust and rely on.”

“With all due respect, Ms. Koning, professionalism can be frightening for a lot of people. But you’d be remiss if you didn’t admit Ophelia is very trustworthy and reliable,” Janus said, poking his head in. “In fact, Lia just found a discrepancy in the vitamin injection crates. I need Nikki with me to examine potential contamination.”

Candice groaned and massaged her neck, where the scars of several stab wounds she refused to say who inflicted probably still caused her phantom pain. “Go ahead. But Nikki, I want you back here tomorrow.

“Fine,” Nikki nodded brusquely and walked outside with Janus. “Elitist jerk,” she muttered.

Janus laughed. “Oh, come on, you know she’s just doing her job.”

“We don’t need a manager. We need some actual vitamin injections. And maintenance,” Nikki pushed a piece of drooping wallpaper away from her face. “This place is falling apart. Half the balcony’s fallen off since Monday. We need some serious refurbishment.”

“You know what’s happened to the majority of the world’s transportation,” Janus said, taking out a cigarette. He held one out for Nikki, but she shook her head. “Suit yourself.”

“I could probably contact the Chinese consulate and ask for a bus or two. I mean, I don’t think many people kept these,” Nikki took out her cell phone. “And I might get it. I can’t imagine that the people who could contact the Chinese government were able to keep their heads. Fucking diplomats. You know, sometimes, when life and death start blurring themselves in my mind, I think that Valentine did us a favor.”

There was some commotion at one of the entrances, thankfully distracting Janus from giving Nikki the tongue-lashing he was aching to give, and they both walked over to see Ophelia and Ryan carrying a woman with a sickly green pallor to her skin.

It was indeed the woman from the bushes that day, and Nikki introduced herself before looking up at Ophelia.

“Prosthetics,” the librarian mouthed, gesturing to the woman’s legs. She must have been thinking of the weapon that Charlie had tried to wield against the two of them three days ago, but before either of them could say anything, Janus had found a scalpel and was getting ready to cut into Gazelle and forming an extremely familiar picture.

“STOP!” before she knew it, Nikki had stood, shouting.

“What the fuck?” Janus’ chest was heaving and he looked moments from losing it completely. “She’s Valentine’s assistant,” his finger was shaking. “She’s the reason for all of this,” he gestured at the crumbling infrastructure of the hospital, at all the people seeking shelter.

“She’s ill and injured.”

“She was well enough to get all the way here from…wherever she was.”

But she had help from a certain suit-clad boy who was conspicuously missing.

“Hasn’t enough blood been spilled?” Nikki asked wearily. She reached into her pocket to find the photograph of the little dead girl, but it was gone. That perked her up considerably.

“Fine! You know what?” Janus threw up his hands. “Fine. You wanna take care of her, you take care of her.”

“Thank you, Janus,” Nikki bent down to lift Gazelle as gently as she could, considering that she was a good foot taller than the medical student. Silently, Ryan walked up next to her.

“Just don’t let me see her face,” Janus added.

“Get Amber out of here,” Nikki told him. “Ophelia, could you go check on Galahad? I don’t want the commotion to scare him.”

“How many clean syringes do we have left?” Nikki asked, holding her hand out after she (probably) disinfected a swab of Gazelle’s arm.

“Just one after you use this one,” Ryan handed it over, distress plain on her face.

“Are you okay?” Nikki asked.

“I don’t like needles,” might have been the understatement of the year. Ryan was almost as pale and green as the woman they were treating.

“Here,” Nikki offered the syringe to him. “You draw her blood. I already found the vein, and I’ll tell you when to stop.”

Ryan shot her a terrified glance, but reached forward anyway. “Why do we have to do this? Aren’t the labs busy? Lia was complaining about this earlier, said they’re swamped.”

“Well, they do have a lot of samples to process, but we get priority because there are too many murders to actually figure out who killed who.”

“Not here,” Ryan said obliviously. “There’s just you. Shit!” he winced. “Sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Nikki shrugged.

Ryan looked at her pensively. “You should hang around Lia more often. She’s calming,” he said quietly. “You’re not so…guilty.”

“I didn’t take this job to relax,” Nikki reminded. “Neither did you. Hang on, I’m going to see if Candice can get us more syringes.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Ryan muttered. “She’s an elitist asshat. I mean, she’s my aunt, but she thinks that taking care of books is for plebs, and Lia is NOT a, you know.”

“Don’t be so negative,” Nikki replied as she started on her way back to Candice’s office. “Go skateboarding or something. And if you meet anybody, tell them we’ve got food, and warn them that there might be some diseases in the bushes,” she said.

Ryan nodded, smiling so widely that Nikki couldn’t help but give an answering one back. It disappeared when she saw Ophelia cowering in front of Candice, despite being several inches taller and nearly a decade older.

“What the fuck?” she demanded. “Ophelia, I told you to go check on Galahad.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Candice said coldly, arms remaining crossed as she turned. “She’s fired, and your patient is missing.”

* * *

 

Eggsy’s mobile rang when right as he opened the hospital doors, and he winced. Of course, this would be the moment he fucked everything up.

“Are you trying to kill us?” a woman about his Harry’s age hissed at him. She snatched it out of his hands, and Eggsy could see MERLIN flashing across the screen.

“Ophelia, for fuck’s sake,” the smoking doctor from the video, now holding an infant girl instead of a cigarette and a scalpel, grabbed the phone. “Those things aren’t evil on their own. They were designed evil by an evil man whose assistant is upstairs, but hey, what do I know. I’m just a glorified babysitter,” but his face noticeably softened when he looked at the baby in his arms. “Sorry about her,” he said to Eggsy, nodding to Ophelia as he handed the phone back, fingers brushing across his suit sleeves.

“It’s not my fault-” Ophelia wasn’t able to finish exonerating herself before Janus put the baby in her arms and held a scalpel out at Eggsy’s throat.

“I want to know why you’re wearing bulletproof material,” he said, paying no attention to Roxy pointing a gun at his head.

“It’s a dangerous world out there,” Eggsy tried to reason, hands in the air.

“Let him go,” Roxy clicked the safety off.

“Your gun safety is atrocious,” Ophelia said calmly, taking a small revolver out of Janus’ back pocket, keeping it pointed at the floor. “Don’t get any ideas,” she warned Janus when he turned to her with an expression Eggsy really wanted to see. “Nikki told me you like to carry a gun.”

Janus sighed and turned back to Eggsy. “Do you know someone named Charlie Hesketh?” he asked.

“He died in Valentine’s bunker,” Roxy said. “The man calling us right now,” she nodded toward Eggsy’s phone on the floor, “killed him.”

“Blew up his head,” Eggsy was probably less able to keep the pride out of his voice than he thought, because Janus dropped his scalpel and put his head in his hands. “It smelled rank, but at least it looked cool.”

Janus’ face shot up. “It smelled? Do you remember what it smelled like?” he asked.

“What are you on about?” Eggsy asked, bewildered.

“Come with me,” Janus said, taking Eggsy’s arm and dragging him into what looked a small storage closet, if the dusty, labeled cubby and even dustier, labeled bags were anything to go by. There was one cubbyhole that was empty despite its being labeled, but far more worrying was the smell best described as fried chicken gone bad.

“Yeah, someone definitely died here,” Eggsy said, looking at the faded stains all over the room.

“Just before a good friend of mine found the headless man’s body, she met a girl who said she blew up a man’s head with her mind. A girl who looks exactly,” Janus pointed upward, “like Valentine’s assistant.”

“There aren’t any electronics here, except that,” Roxy nodded to the old television on a cart, connected to a VCR next to it. “And I doubt anyone’s seen something like that in ages.”

“Then he must have been chipped,” Eggsy said.

“But why? The people who knew Valentine’s plan don’t sound like the people who would put a little girl under protective guard in a hospital,” Roxy pointed out.

“I’m sorry, but what did you mean when you said, ‘chipped?’” Ophelia asked. “Is it like the chips he put in those cell phones?”

“Oh, uh, sort of,” Eggsy answered. “He also had a chip to make it so that certain people weren’t thrown into a homicidal rage.”

Ophelia pursed her lips. “How did these _people_ get those chips?”

“Mostly by agreeing to keep his plan secret,” Roxy answered, putting a hand on Ophelia’s shoulder for some reason. “They were set to explode if any of them tried to reveal it.”

“You said that there the girl who saw the man’s head explode looked like Gazelle?” Eggsy asked Janus, who nodded. “Then I think I know what’s going on here.”

He didn’t get a chance to say what it was to three expectant faces, because Charlie was suddenly on top of him, punching and choking him until Roxy and Janus both pulled him off. He didn’t even get the chance to spit out a clever one-liner before the world went black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If it helps you to visualize this a bit better, I think Candice would be played by Meryl Streep and Ophelia would be played by Julie Andrews.


	7. Nikki, Eggsy, and Janus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nikki finds Harry and thinks he wants something, Eggsy finds out how Charlie survived, and Janus and Ophelia have fun with each other before he gets a flashback of his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be aware that there is a flashback that describes the carnage I think would've been found at the church after Harry killed everyone. If you would prefer not to read it, please skip past the italicized passages.

"Find Galahad," Nikki felt foolish speaking to a pair of glasses out loud, and tried to keep it quiet. The little green letters changed into "BIOMETRIC TRIANGULATION: AGENT HARRY HART" and she thought she might have figured out Galahad's name, finally.

"BIOMETRIC TRIANGULATION COMPLETE" the green letters flashed, and underneath it was the address of a very familiar church.

"Of fucking course," Nikki sighed. He had his memories back now, and if his quick escape was anything to go by, he remembered her trying to kill him, too. Of fucking course.

She heard several bursts of static, underneath which might have been a man's voice, but it wasn't very clear, and she decided to ignore him in favor of heading out to the church. But first, she pulled out her cell phone and texted, "My lover's got humor," and hoped he would get it sooner rather than later. Really, with so few people maintaining cell phone towers nowadays, it was a wonder any of them still worked. Nikki made a mental note to call the Chinese consulate before her phone ran out of signal permanently. The hospital really needed some new supplies and maintenance.

* * *

When he woke up, Roxy was bandaging Janus' hands and Ophelia was checking an unconscious Charlie's pulse.

"'Lo," Eggsy greeted them all groggily. "These amnesia darts are awful," he said, resolving not to use them again, until the next time people were shooting at him.

"So are you," Charlie growled. So, not so unconscious after all.

"What the fuck are you doing here with your head on?" Eggsy demanded. "Merlin killed you, I saw it."

"No you didn't!" Charlie rose and pushed Ophelia off him. Immediately, Roxy and Janus pulled him back, but he would not be silenced. "You see this?" he pulled down his collar so Eggsy could see the cut where he had received the implant. The flesh around it was burned. "You put your ring here and you disabled it when you tased me."

Ah. "So, when you woke up, you saw..."

"My parents and my little sister are dead because of what you did!" Charlie screamed, fighting against Roxy and Janus.

"They died because of what your parents did," Roxy snapped. "If they hadn't gotten the implant, and put it in Sarah, they'd still be alive right now."

"Or they'd have killed each other, like that fucking nurse of Hart's did to Gazelle's clone."

"Clone?" Janus sounded incredulous. "But she was, what, ten, eleven years old? There's no what that kind of technology is available now, let alone-"

"For fuck's sake, mate," Charlie almost laughed. "He had the technology to make the entire world homicidal. You think he'd balk at cloning a human? Look, I'll tell you more if you let me punch-" he couldn't finish, because Roxy pinched a nerve under his ear and he was out.

"'That nurse of Hart's?'" Eggsy repeated. "Harry's here?"

"Who's Harry?" Janus asked in reply.

"Fifties, dark hair, tall, dark eyes, probably wearing a suit like Eggsy's, with his hair slicked back like Eggsy's, big shoes like Eggsy's, tie…like Eggsy's," Roxy listed off.

"Gunshot wound to the head and deep cut in his stomach?" Ophelia looked guilty.

"I reckon he might have gotten cut during the fight, yeah," Eggsy said. "There were some parts I didn't watch."

"Uh, he's gone," Ophelia admitted, scratching the back of her neck.

"He has amnesia. So far we haven't been able to recover many memories. And he keeps saying random nonsense. I mean, rain-makers?" Janus shook his head dispiritedly.

Eggsy and Roxy looked at each other, an action not lost on the doctor.

"Huh, so he wasn't just speaking nonsense," Janus muttered. "Well, what did my assistant have to do with it, then?" he nodded his head toward Charlie.

"I don't know. There wasn't much time between his flunking out and his being found at the bunker," Eggsy answered.

"What did he-" the older woman began to ask.

"Back to the problem at hand, Gazelle putting her clone in a room with no tech besides a color television, and having a chipped, armed guard in the room," Roxy reminded.

"Why? You don't think she actually cared for the girl's wellbeing, right?" Eggsy asked. "I mean, that woman's psychotic."

"No, she's not. She's fully grounded in reality," Janus corrected. At Eggsy's dirty look, he added, "Psychiatrist cum coroner."

"Well, if she's here, then we can just ask her, right?" Roxy reasoned. "What room is she in?"

"Candice's office," Ophelia answered. "I can take you there, but I'm not going in. That woman irritates the dickens out of me."

Janus stared at her. "Did you just fucking say, 'the dickens?'"

"It's a very useful word," Ophelia insisted. "It accurately sums up my feelings on Candice without forcing me to be vulgar."

"Damn, no wonder Nikki likes you," Janus whistled.

"She does?" Ophelia looked startled.

"Yeah, she's got a thing for authority figures, especially ones she can't boss around," Janus grimaced. "You should've seen her try to flirt with Candice when she first arrived."

Ophelia shuddered. "I'll pass, thank you."

"Can we get a move on?" Eggsy complained as Roxy pulled out a pair of handcuffs and cuffed Charlie to the bed Eggsy had just been on.

"Right this way," Ophelia said, walking down.

*****

"So, you and Nikki," Janus said slyly. "How long's that been going on?"

"It hasn't. She loves to read, I was a librarian who hosted stargazing and camping trips and book release events, and we're friends," Ophelia looked straight ahead.

"Uh-huh, that's why she braved the streets of scavengers to find you and get you to safety here," until he saw Janus, Eggsy hadn't known it was possible to nod mockingly.

"She's always been brave. Not many people would come visit an old woman who killed multiple children," Ophelia sounded much more torn-up than Nikki had.

"She was more upset that you'd locked yourself away. You know what she did, right?" Janus asked.

"She said she's the only killer in this hospital. How is that possible?"

Janus shrugged. "We found out after we came back together that Candice gave everyone the rest of the day off," now he sounded bitter, because he had no partner.

"Can she do that? This is a hospital," Ophelia frowned.

Janus shrugged. "Well, she was still here, and just a couple hours ago, those of us who were working had to respond to the church massacre."

"And that didn't make you suspicious, your boss telling everyone to leave?" Roxy asked.

"It had been a long day," Janus turned around and hissed in her face. To her credit, she didn't take an immediate step back.

_The mood was hopeful at first, when everyone hopped off the ambulances. Doctors, first responders, and medical students alike were all pulled from the tiny hospital to deal with what several 911 callers said sounded like a war. If the man outside was anything to go by, with congealed blood stuck to over half his face--too much to be survivable--then it was an apt description._

_The buzzing of multiple mosquitoes was amplified in the otherwise silent church. Bodies and the implements used to kill them were spread all over the slippery, stinking floor._

_Janus felt a vindictive rush he felt when he saw the pinched face of the blonde who had held signs outside the library, claiming that the woman who ran it would be going to hell. Then he felt sick. Even if she wasn't a good person, she was still a person, and she didn't deserve such a violent death._

_None of them did, and everywhere he looked, everywhere anyone looked, there was another mutilated corpse, another body to bury. At this rate, he would run out of space in his ambulance. (He had no idea just how good he had it.)_

_It was one of the medical students who noticed it, Nicole Zhi. She had run outside, presumably to throw up like so many of the others, and gave a sharp cry when she noticed that the man who had been shot in the goddamned head was actually still breathing. She packed him away into the ambulance, and Janus resumed his search with fresh vigor. Everyone did. They might find the next survivor and get to go back, away from this stench.  
_

_It was all in vain. Nikki had found the only survivor. It was only fair that she take care of him while Janus and the others filled out death certificates and examined the cadavers to see what, exactly, had prompted them all to kill each other. Personally, Janus thought that someone must have infiltrated them, someone who embodied one of the traits that the church despised. A queer person, perhaps, or someone who'd had an abortion. And then that started a physical fight that had snowballed until everyone except the man with the glasses and the bulletproof suit was dead._

_Honestly, when Candice had given the order for everyone to go home, it was a relief._

"Janus, Janus!" Ophelia brought him out of it, shaking his arm. "We have patients to see. Don't do this."

Janus blinked and shook his head to clear the cobwebs. "I can definitely see why she likes you," he said softly. "Come on, let's keep going."

"How many stories does this fucking hospital have?" Eggsy complained.

"We've got enough," Janus said as his cell phone beeped. He started humming a song, and then it beeped again.

* * *

"Hi there," Nikki poked her head in cautiously, aware that if Harry remembered what she had done to him, that he could easily be spooked. "Are you still not talking?" she asked, remembered what Janus had told her the last time he had been in a room with Harry.

"You really shouldn't speak to me," Harry said, and okay, that stung a lot.

"I'm your doctor," Nikki reminded. Sure, she had given Harry a life-threatening injury while trying to kill him (twice). But she also did her very best to heal him. He didn't necessarily have to be grateful, but would it kill him to look at least like he didn't want to kill Nikki where she stood? Speaking of which, she reached into the bag at her hip for the antibiotics.

"Thank you for your care," Harry said. "Now, please go away."

"Did you kill all these people inside this church?" Nikki asked, looking at the not-so-faded stains on the floor. The crime scene cleanup crew would've come in the morning if the entire world had not turned into one giant crime scene, and if cleaning fluid weren't so damn harmful to human flesh.

"Yes," Harry said brusquely.

"And you remembered it," Nikki didn't need an answer for that one. "Did you remember anything else?"

His silence was her answer. Nikki knew that this was the moment of reckoning.

"Did you remember me trying to kill you?"


	8. Ophelia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ophelia is a librarian who knows a little bit about everything.
> 
> (Please note that this chapter contains character death via hemorrhagic edema, even though the narrator doesn't know it. But it's nowhere near as graphic as other scenes.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is going to be the last update for a while because the Mad Max fandom has claimed my muse. It's going to be at least three weeks before I update this again. Sorry!

“What happened?” Ophelia demanded.

Janus didn’t say anything until he pressed the phone to his ear. “Who are you and how did you hack into my phone?” he demanded.

The caller said something unsatisfactory, and Janus growled, “No, I asked you a question, _Merlin_ , and you’re going to-”

The boy—what was his name? Eggy?—snatched the phone out of his hand. When Janus leapt at him, Roxy pinned him to the wall with surprising speed.

“Well, who got them online?” Iggy asked as he turned toward the stairs. Roxy started climbing after him, and Janus was only one step behind her.

“I’ll just wait here,” Ophelia called up, knowing that her knees couldn’t take going all the way back up. Aggy offered his help, but she waved him away. Whatever they were doing must be important if Janus was actually answering his phone.

She winced as she bent down to sit on the bottom rung, rubbing her swelling ankles. Nikki had given her some exercises to improve her circulation, but for the life of her, Ophelia couldn’t remember them. But she was pretty sure that rubbing her ankles was at least one of the instructions, so she kept at her ministrations, which was why she didn’t see Candice until the younger woman had grabbed her by the hair and started dragging her further down the stairs, past the overstuffed morgue.

“I thought I told you to leave,” Candice grunted in pain when Ophelia kicked her in the shin, tightening her grip on the older woman’s arm for her efforts.

“I didn’t have anywhere to go. The demand for librarians isn’t exactly high right now,” Ophelia was losing the fight she knew she never had any chance of winning. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Where’s Nicole?” Candice asked.

“Nikki is Anglicized from Li Qi, not shortened from Nicole. Do you know anything about her at all?” Ophelia demanded.

“I know that she kept trying to get you out of that building after V-Day,” Candice finally let go under the flickering lights of the abandoned parking lot. “She likes you more than you think.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Ophelia responded, taking a step back. “What are you doing?” she tried not to make it too obvious that she was looking for a potential weapon.

“I need my best doctor with me,” Candice said. “And for that, I need Nikki to stay guilty.”

Ophelia furrowed her brow. “What are you talking about?”

“I told Gazelle that Galahad killed Ambrosia. And if that woman can knock a woman out when she’s suffering the effects of blood poisoning and traveling across an entire ocean, then she can knock her out when she’s had a day to recover,” Candice said.

“And let me guess,” Ophelia said, walking closer to a cement column to lean against it, “you’re only telling me this because you want to kill me.”

“Yup,” Candice held up a syringe as she came closer. “It doesn’t matter where I inject this snake venom. But if you can’t tell me where Nikki is, then at least make it easy for yourself and let me inject this into an artery.”

Ophelia swallowed. “Was your specialty in poisoning?” she asked, taking a step back so that she was next to the column instead of standing between it and Candice.

“No, cranial trauma, like Nikki, and if you’re trying to slam my head into it in hopes that you’re going to knock me out, don’t. You’re an old woman and this ain’t that kind of movie,” Candice answered calmly. “Why do you want to know?” she asked, taking Ophelia’s arm and peering closely at it.

“Because I want to make sure you can’t treat yourself,” Ophelia said as she snatched the syringe from Candice and stuck it between the woman’s ribs in one fluid motion. “Thing is, being a librarian around little kids, you develop your reflexes very…ew,” Ophelia stumbled back after depressing the plunger, as Candice began foaming at the mouth. “I think your snake venom went bad. I have a couple books on this.” Candice crumpled to the ground, and Ophelia almost ran away, pausing to talk to the prone figure at the foot of the stairs. “We might be able to treat you if I get Nikki back and she decides to spare your life.”

With that, Ophelia began her slow climb up the stairs, unaware that Candice was already dead.


End file.
